Arktische Kohle. Das sowjetische Engagement auf Spitzbergen, 1928-1949

To diversify the USSR’s energy supply, a major objective of the Stalinist command economy, Soviet workers were sent to Norway’s Svalbard (Spitzbergen) archipelago in 1931 to mine coal. Drawing on archival materials, this paper discusses the complex entanglement this resource extraction meant for Mos...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Frey, Felix
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:German
Published: Schwabe 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://boris.unibe.ch/119673/1/004_Frey_SZG_2_2018.pdf
https://boris.unibe.ch/119673/
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Summary:To diversify the USSR’s energy supply, a major objective of the Stalinist command economy, Soviet workers were sent to Norway’s Svalbard (Spitzbergen) archipelago in 1931 to mine coal. Drawing on archival materials, this paper discusses the complex entanglement this resource extraction meant for Moscow, the Kola Peninsula, and Svalbard. The archipelago was by no means an Arctic sideshow: miners flooded the streets of Murmansk, in far northwest Russia, awaiting their departure to the archipelago, and Svalbard coal fueled the furnaces of the Kola Peninsula Murmansk is located on. Officials in distant Moscow tried to regulate the oft-problematic circulation of coal and workers, in the process reconfiguring the understanding of how coal and miners were interrelated both technically and socially. In 1946, matters reversed due to changed geopolitical objectives. Rather than having miners dig coal to be sent to Russia, the war-ravaged mines were rebuilt; now workers were sent to Svalbard in order to strengthen Soviet claims on the territory.